DINING ROOM

The dining room of Casa Cuseni is the only surviving interior in the world by Sir Frank Brangwyn, a member of the Royal Academy. The interior was created in Taormina in 1910 by the renowned Sir Frank Brangwyn, a British member of the Royal Academy, but concealed for over a hundred years because it tackled, in the Art Nouveau decoration of the murals, an issue that is still controversial and debated today: same-sex parenting.

The murals were made in Taormina, a place safe from the Labouchere Amendment, a law of 1885 that had convicted the poet Oscar Wilde in 1895. Exactly one century after its creation, the dining room of Casa Cuseni is now finally open to the public. The room encapsulates the political and artistic thinking of John Ruskin and William Morris, the pre-Raphaelite painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne Jones, the architectural design of Josef Hoffmann, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Philip Webb, all condensed in the magical brushwork of Sir Frank Brangwyn, the first decorator of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

In 2019, this interior was recognised as the world’s best example of the Arts and Crafts Movement outside Britain and was declared a Place of Identity and Memory of the Sicilian Region.